After several long months running some very intense campaigns, when all of the votes were counted last night across Portland and up in Brunswick, where mental health and domestic violence advocate Whitney A. Parrish ran for town council, every single one of the handful of progressive upstart “Bernie-crat” candidates in southern Maine came up short.

In the Portland race for City Council At-Large, Jill Duson, the former fossil fuel lobbyist, who, over her 16 years on council, has proven a vocal opponent to the city’s low income residents, consistently blocking their rights to a fair wage, affordable housing and public health services, even going so far as to try to sell the public park at the center of the city, Congress Square, to a luxury developer, emerged victorious with 44% of the vote.

Left in the wake were Joey Brunelle, a local software engineer and progressive community organizer, at 30%, and Bree LaCasse, a lifelong Portlander, public school advocate and nonprofit worker, at 26%.

In the race to represent District Four, which extends out from the north shore of the Back Cove, Justin Costa, a young politically centrist lawyer, won re-election over Kim Rich, a political newcomer and progressive firebrand, who quit her job as an administrative worker at Maine Med after Donald Trump was elected to become a full-time activist and social justice advocate.

In the race to represent District Five, the city’s northern most district, Kim Cook, a local lawyer and former member of Porland’s Zoning Board of Appeals, soundly defeated her two opponents, Marpheen Chan and Craig Dorais, both of whom are avowed Democratic Socialists.

So what now?

As I see it, had every one of the progressive candidates who threw their hat in the ring for the first time this year came out on top, they’d still all just be in the middle of the work.

Attaining a significant position in local government is certainly a real accomplishment, but being a leader is a lot bigger than simply holding a seat. Most positions in state and local government require never ending meetings and a mountain of bureaucracy, all for very little pay. Being a leader is bigger than that. Politics is bigger than that.

Politics is about bringing people together. It’s about shaping the public conversation. If you play guitar, you’re a musician, whether or not you’re currently in a band. Same thing if you’re a genuine leader: your administration doesn’t start when you win, it starts the moment you begin putting your first campaign together. And when you do get elected, the campaign doesn’t end the minute the tallies are posted. As long as you’re in the public eye, you’ve got to continue inspiring people to follow you.

Sure there are victories and defeats along the way, but the work itself is ongoing. It stretches for decades. Collectively, it’s been going on for centuries. If genuinely done in earnest, in a lot of ways, ethically leading other people is the hardest thing human beings are capable of. It’s a blessing to be somebody who feels a significant calling to step up.

So, I don’t know. If you’re one of the many people who worked on a progressive campaign this cycle, get some rest. Dust yourself off. Nothing’s really changed. It rarely does. But it can. 2018 is coming. Hang in there everybody.

]]>http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/2017/11/08/home/portland-progressives-lost-big-last-night-what-now/feed/0821Joey Brunelle is, by far, the ONLY good choice for Council At-Largehttp://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/2017/11/06/home/joey-brunelle-is-by-far-the-only-good-choice-for-council-at-large/
http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/2017/11/06/home/joey-brunelle-is-by-far-the-only-good-choice-for-council-at-large/#respondMon, 06 Nov 2017 10:26:31 +0000http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/?p=806Jill Duson

Jill Duson, the incumbent in this year’s race for City Council At-Large, has served on Portland’s City Council since 2001, and it’s time for her to go.

Duson grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania in the sixties, and after graduating from the local public schools, attended Antioch College where she studied Literature and Political Science. She went on to earn a law degree from U Penn, beginning her practice as an advocate for the elderly, moving to Maine in 1984 and taking on a leadership role with the Maine Council on Aging.

In 1987, when she was in her early thirties, however, Duson switched focus and took a job with Central Maine Power as one of their top lobbyists in Augusta, and for the next couple decades, she made her living lobbying for different corporate fossil fuel interests. Since getting elected to the Portland City Council back in 2001, for the most part, Duson’s continued to further those same private interests.

In 2012, Duson tried to sell off Portland’s central public space, Congress Square, to a wealthy out of state developer who wanted to turn it into a corporate ball room. In 2015, when local activists put pressure on the City Council to raise Portland’s minimum wage, Duson tried hard to limit the increase to a mere $8.75 an hour, a far cry from the $10.10 the City Council eventually agreed to. Last year, when City Manager John Jennings suggested that the municipality close the City’s wildly popular, publicly funded health clinic on India Street, Duson strongly supported the effort.

Duson’s record on the Portland City Council simply isn’t the record of an activist. It’s the record of a corporate lobbyist.

Justice never happens automatically. The only time governments ever behave fairly is when the people in charge of them are willing to take a stand and risk confronting the big employers and property owners who are benefiting from the current arrangements of things.

It’s time for her to go.

—

Bree LaCasse

Bree LaCasse grew up in the West End, on the same street where she lives today, and even went to the Reiche public elementary school, which her son currently attends.

Her folks have been Portland fixtures for decades. Her mom, Pandora LaCasse, does the elaborate holiday light installations that go up across the city every winter, and her dad, David LaCasse, is an engineer who’s been helping out around town for decades.

Much of the discussion that I’ve seen over the last few months about her candidacy has dealt with her being wealthy and out of touch, but while I have no way of gauging her personal net worth, my sense is that Bree and her husband aren’t outlandishly wealthy, at least not by the new Portland standards. What is clear, however, is that much of what Bree does professionally in the world revolves around the close relationships that she maintains with people who are incredibly wealthy.

In the nineties, Bree attended Bowdoin and graduated toward the top of her class with a degree in French. In the years since, she’s worked on a number of things around Portland, including helping the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project raise money, helping the Portland Museum of Art raise money, helping Friends of Congress Square raise money, and now at Community Housing of Maine, her current source of employment, one of her primary responsibilities is, you guessed it, raising money.

To be clear, I think those are all good causes, and I’m grateful that she helped them all get the funds they need to serve our community in the ways that they do. I too went to a small liberal arts school. For better or for worse, almost all progressive political causes and community organizations rely on the charitable beneficence of the wealthy to survive, and it’s the people like Bree who keep that money coming in.

Bree’s smart. She’s well organized. Donors must like her and find her trustworthy, or she couldn’t possibly do what she does. When Congress Square was in danger of being sold out from under the city, Bree did admirable work to help save it, and after the campaign was over, she stepped up as the executive director of the newly formed Friends of Congress Square, coordinating all the different people in our community, from tango dancers to classic cinema buffs, who wanted to bring the space to life in their own way.

But, what I’ve never seen Bree do is speak out against injustice in a way that required her to risk any of the relationships that she has with wealthy people. Rich people, in general, like art museums, public parks, reduced barriers to immigration and government sanctioned “affordable housing” programs that enable them to get out of paying taxes. I like those things too, but being willing to fundraise for them isn’t much of a litmus test.

What the wealthy don’t tend to like is paying their workers any more than they have to, getting any less in rent than they might otherwise, or having to foot the bill so people who don’t have money can access social services. Those things require fights, and Bree simply has never done that work. She stayed miles away from the India Street and minimum wage campaigns. She’s been in Portland her whole life, and as far as I can tell, this campaign is the first time she’s had anything to say publicly about the struggles facing low income tenants. I appreciate her current support of the Paid Sick Days bill currently being discussed by Council, but if faced with a tension between a private interest that she had a personal connection with and the greater good of her own constituents, I just don’t trust that she’d be willing to make the riskier vote.

Bree has also taken a fair amount of heat for some of her campaign tactics, including raising $50k for a race that usually takes half of that, associating with aspiring political terrorist Steven Biel, and sending out a mailer that seriously looked like it was an endorsement from the Portland Press Herald, which the newspaper immediately loudly renounced.

I honestly think most of this stuff has been kind of funny, but what it does speak to, I think, is a certain weird aloofness that often comes with wealth. I just have a hard time imagining anybody who had their nose to the grindstone at a typical job would think that the fake endorsement mailer was going to fly. If you spend too much time around the wealthy, it’s easy to start feeling like the rules no longer apply to you, and that’s not a state of mind that any community leader should be in.

—

Joey Brunelle

So why do I think you should vote for Joey?

While it’s true that he hasn’t earned his living as a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry nor made his life in the wacky stratosphere of affluent hobnobbing, and that alone might be reason enough to vote for him given the competition, I also genuinely really like the guy.

Joey grew up in Kennebunk, went to public schools and graduated from Brown in 2007 with a BA in Art History. From there he went off to San Francisco, where he lived for most of his twenties, programming websites and producing podcasts and short films, before moving back to Maine a couple years ago, taking his programming work with him on his laptop. He makes homemade jam. He recently bought a condo on Munjoy Hill where he lives today. He believes in quoting the drag queen RuPaul.

Joey doesn’t need to be doing this.

He’s not a retired corporate lawyer sauntering into City Hall like he owns the place. I’m not sure he’s ever even been to the kind of fundraiser where you have to pay hundreds of dollars for a plate of food (neither have I).

But he’s exactly what Portland needs right now.

Joey has an inexplicable, yet profound, love of street-level political organizing. He was at the forefront of the fight to Save India Street. He put a bunch of free time into working with me to set up the Portland visual budget app. Joey seems to show up at everything, from the Bernie Sanders campaign, to the Southern Maine Workers Center, to the Portland Democrats to almost every City Council meeting. He does this not beause he has anything particularly to gain from it, honestly a lot of it is pretty boring, but because he truly cares a lot about people who are suffering in our community, and elsewhere, and really wants to help them in a meaningful way.

I’m confident that, even if Joey doesn’t win tomorrow, he’ll keep showing up and working hard to stand up for what’s right. But I’m also confident that if he does win, it’ll be because he really wants to be there, and he will have arrived there on his own steam. He isn’t reckless, but he won’t shy away from a fight either. He lives for this stuff.

Portland has some significant challenges, for sure, but we aren’t the first city to face any of these. There are solutions out there that work. There’s got to be. Joey’s a voracious reader. He’s a techie. His approach to public policy is more worldly and well-informed than than that of the vast majority of our current council.

We’re living at a moment where so many of us are furious at what’s happening in this country, but, while most of us are quick to talk about how much we hate Trump, what do we do? For folks like Joey, the answer is simple. You jump in to the fray with both feet. Now it’s on us, the voters, to see that he wins.

I know this whole week has been exhausting. It’s been exhausting for me too. Everybody I know is tired.

And I know you think you’re being totally reasonable. It’s complicated, you say, the important thing is that we remain on friendly terms with each other despite our political differences. Clearly, there’s blame on all sides. Let’s just focus on getting along and do the best we can to avoid confrontation and mind our own business.

I disagree.

As we saw in Charlottesville last weekend, these days, the number of outspoken white supremacists in this country is growing. They’re waving Nazi flags in the street. They say Black people are savage “negroids” who need to be put back in line. They feel they ought to be allowed to shoot entire unarmed families coming up from Mexico at point blank range. They hate LGBTQ folks and Jews, like me, and they say horrible things about women.

It’s not a joke.

At 1:45pm on Saturday, as we now all know, James Fields, a 20-year-old male resident of Ohio and Nazi sympathizer, slammed a car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and maiming at least 19 others.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. A chilling article from 2014 published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, recounts around 100 homicides committed over the course of just a few years by the members of the white supremacist website StormFront. What’s most horrifying about the story is that, every time one of the grisly murders garnered headlines, the website’s popularity grew by leaps and bounds.

If you can’t reject these serial killers as the homicidal maniacs they are without needing to interject a whole bunch of but, but, buts, I honestly don’t think you’re much better than they are.

Back in 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children between six and seven years old in Newtown, Connecticut, as well as six adult staff members, nobody questioned whether or not the kids might be at fault for instigating the violence. It’d be vile to suggest that if the kids hadn’t been such brats, they might still be alive. In the face of hundreds of raging white supremacists calling for even greater horror, the situation in Charlottesville was no different.

My housemate from Rwanda who survived the genocide there says he’s really not sure where stuff is going right now, and I can’t help but agree. We don’t know. Sure most people in this country aren’t posting blatantly Nazi memes to Facebook, but most people in Germany in the thirties weren’t Nazi propagandists either. They just kept their mouths shut as their neighbors increasingly went off the deep end.

I desperately want everybody in this country to feel united with each other, but I believe strongly that remaining silent when our fellow Americans start calling for genocide isn’t how we get there. What should unite us is our shared belief that, no matter the circumstances, you really shouldn’t drive your car into a crowd of people or call for millions of human beings to be sent to gas chambers.

If all we’ve got holding us together is our shared desire to avoid any sort of conflict with one another, our societal glue couldn’t be weaker.

I’m sure some of the people reading this are thinking that, if only I knew you and your life story, I wouldn’t hold your unwillingness to “take a side” here against you. You’re a good mom and a good Christian, you just don’t believe in protesting. Your grandmother was a Jew. You love puppies and sunshine. But the truth is that your biography doesn’t matter here.

There’s only one real question at stake right now – how do you respond to evil? Do you sit by quietly, your hands in your lap, waiting for it all to be over? Do you condemn those brave enough to speak out against it for being too noisy, holding fast to the notion that it simply isn’t proper to raise your voice, and yes, your fists, like that? Or do you summon your courage and call white supremacy out for the delusional atrocity it is and take a stand against it?

As tempting as it might be, I’m not saying that we should stop loving our friends and family members just because they refuse to unequivocally condemn white supremacy. Love is hardest, and most important, precisely when our loved one’s behavior is abhorrent. It’s hard to love an active heroin user. Even harder to love somebody who’s chronic anger keeps leading them to commit acts of violence.

But that doesn’t mean that we need to condone our loved ones’ behavior either. If anything, loving them compels us to tell them what we think about what they’re doing and how it’s making us feel. As difficult as it can be to have conversations about white supremacy and what our reaction should be to it, I believe strongly that we ought to have those conversations anywhere we can. As long as those conversations remain relegated to living room chats between like-minded liberals and online comment battles between strangers, nothing will ever change.

Another reason why these conversations are hard is because in the last few days, there’s been an avalanche of victim blaming and activist shaming. Millions of Americans are now saying that we, the minority of people actively confronting injustice, are the ones to blame for that very injustice.

If only the activists resisting the hate groups in Charlottesville hadn’t provoked the white supremacists, they never would have been attacked like that. If only she hadn’t been a protestor, Heather Heyer would still be alive today.

But, my sense is that things are so tense in this country right now that, regardless of what we do, hate groups are going to continue gaining traction here. When some of these sentiments came to the fore last year, American white supremacists at least had to pretend that “All lives matter.” Today, with Trump, they’re flying their Nazi flags in the open. The more entitled and unencumbered they feel, the worse it is almost certain to get.

If you’re white and aren’t seeing it, there’s a good chance that you just aren’t seeing it because it isn’t targeted at you. They’ve been coming for my Muslim and Black friends for a while now, but personally, Charlottesville is the first time I can remember that I’ve seen a mass of people assemble against Jews like me. I guess I’m in the cross-hairs now too. Maybe you’ll be next?

There is no neutral ground here.

I’m not saying the counter-protestors are angels. I’m saying it doesn’t matter how aggressive they were. General Patton was no angel either, but both sides were not responsible for the Holocaust. In Charlottesville, one side was flying Nazi flags. The other was trying to stop them. One side drove a CAR into a crowd of people. The other got hit.

Staying silent right now is akin to watching your neighbors become serial killers and begin mowing down people in the street, and saying it’s too complicated for you to have an opinion.

No.

The good news, is that for right now at least, as scary as they are, the white supremacists seem pretty disorganized. It’s clear that there’s a good number of them and that they’re both genuinely racist and incredibly angry, but beyond that, I’m not sure they’re yet capable of doing much more than sparking a riot.

But the more that our president, our governor, and the millions of people just like them refuse to outrightly and wholeheartedly condemn them, the stronger they’ll get. It’s on us, all of us, to stop them.

]]>http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/2017/08/17/home/dear-mr-and-ms-blame-on-all-sides/feed/0794Trump’s Week 26 Newsletter (Explained and Exposed)http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/2017/07/24/home/trumps-week-26-newsletter-explained-and-exposed/
http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/2017/07/24/home/trumps-week-26-newsletter-explained-and-exposed/#respondMon, 24 Jul 2017 21:19:54 +0000http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/?p=785Welcome to “Explained and Exposed,” a new series I’ll be writing every week, dissecting the truth behind the latest email newsletter that the Trump White House has sent out to its supporters. I encourage you to read the official Trump newsletters for yourself and come to your own conclusions. They’re all available for free public download here.

…

You can read Trump’s newsletter “Week 26: Made in America” in its entirety here.

Saturday, Jul 22

MADE IN AMERICA WEEK

President Trump hosted companies from across the country at the White House to showcase products Made in America…

Reviving American industry has always been a center piece of Trump’s platform, but according to GQ, many American manufacturers aren’t buying it. GQ sat down with 11 American manufacturers to gauge their support for Trump’s policies, and it turns out that very few believed that the “isolationist” trade policies that Trump has proposed would be likely to help their businesses.

For one, in order to make their products, almost all American manufacturers depend on imported materials, from yarn to pocket linings to buttons. Many also conduct much of their sales overseas, making haphazard restraints on imports and exports serious roadblocks to their businesses. Trade restrictions would likely affect the domestic market as well, driving up the costs of American made products past the point that many American consumers would be willing to pay.

And, while Trump has staged a ton of symbolic public spectacles like the one described in his newsletter above, when it comes to his family’s own business, it’s hard to see these events as much more than shallow publicity stunts. As CNN reports, Ivanka Trump’s line of apparel and accessories are made exclusively overseas in countries such as Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Bangladesh, places that are widely known for operating sweat shops with terrible working conditions.

As I see it, American industry has become deeply integrated into the global economy, and no matter what we do, there’s no going back. And we shouldn’t. American businesses are globally competitive and rely on global markets to thrive. Instead of being scared of participating in the world outside our borders, we should be crafting honest, intelligent, humane terms for global trade.

What Trump’s doing instead is shutting out the world, while maintaining special exemptions for his own private interests. And, on top of it all, he’s lying to the American public. I’m sure it’s fun to pose for a photo pretending to drive an American-made firetruck on the White House lawn, but it’s a poor substitute for actually crafting a strategic foreign trade policy.

UPHOLDING AMERICAN ELECTION INTEGRITY

By establishing this commission, President Trump is taking action to ensure that the ballot box remains the crown jewel of American liberties…

Another thing that the Trump administration loves to trumpet is the menacing threat of “voter fraud,” claiming that millions of illicit votes were cast in the 2016 election. This new commission, the administration claims, will stand as a proud bulwark, courageously defending our voting system against this imposing threat to American democracy

Kobach’s criminal behavior seems only to be continuing in his new role. Since taking over the commission, Kobach’s first move has been to request private voting records from all 50 states, a move many believe to be in direct violation of the federal Privacy Act of 1974.

Support the commission if you want to. I can’t stop you. But you should understand that doing so has nothing to do with stopping an actual threat to American democracy and everything to do with making it harder for people who disagree with Donald Trump to vote in upcoming elections. And, personally, I have a hard time imagining anything less American than that.

LISTENING TO IDEAS FROM OUR SERVICE MEMBERS

President Trump and Vice President Pence sat down for lunch with service members who served in Afghanistan…

Trump loves to talk about how he’s going to bat for our nation’s veterans, but again, the problem here is that he simply isn’t living up to it.

At present, there are 338,800 disabled vets receiving these benefits, about two-thirds of whom are over age 60, and advocates say that the cuts could mean a reduction of as much as $22,000 per year for some eligible veterans. According to Carlos Fuentes, the Legislative Director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the week the proposal was announced, 30,000 emails and letters flooded Congress in opposition to it.

According to Millitary.com, John Rowan, national president of Vietnam Veterans of America, said the cuts would “completely abandon many of the most severely disabled veterans of the Vietnam generation and could make thousands of elderly veterans homeless.”

Kudos to Trump for making the time to eat lunch with veterans, but hamming it up over ham sandwiches won’t keep our nation’s vets out of poverty.

For our nation’s men and women returning from the horrors of war, civilian life can be incredibly hard. On average, around 20 US veterans kill themselves every day. If we look past the photo ops, far from making America great again, the legislative proposals that the Trump administration is pursuing would likely only make things worse for our veterans.

As Trump likes to ask, are you tired of all the fake news? If so, come back next week when I explain and expose Trump’s Week 27 newsletter. Thanks for reading!

I remember sitting there in B Block English when our class was interrupted by the news that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. My classmates and I didn’t know what to make of it. Shaken, our teacher turned us back toward our discussion of “Macbeth.” Then we heard that a second plane had also crashed into the twin towers. Then a plane hit the Pentagon. And another crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

I remember going out for a birthday dinner with my parents that night. Everybody was bewildered. It felt like the sky was falling.

A couple days later, somebody in the lunchroom told me about an apocalyptic vision that some guy named Nostradamus had, which began with the siege of two towers. It all sounded plausible to me. Maybe the world really was ending? I remember laying awake every night for the next couple months, terrified.

I remember distinctly how popular media seemed to almost grind to a halt. John Stewart, the most trusted voice in my family’s living room, went off the air for nine days. All we really had to go on was the horrifying camcorder footage of the attacks, played over and over again, and a corporate news establishment that seemed mostly to just parrot press releases from the Bush administration verbatim.

Nobody had smart phones, and it would be several years before Mark Zuckerberg dreamed up Facebook. It would be even longer until Twitter launched. Wikipedia was a few months old, but nobody that I can remember knew anything about it. I think my family had a slow as sludge dial-up Internet connection through AOL.

In retrospect, I can’t imagine how the American populace could possibly have been more exploitable than we were at that moment.

The only member of either house to vote against the measure was Rep. Barbara Lee, a former Black Panther from Oakland, who decried the measure as a “a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the September 11 events—anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit.”

How right she was.

Today, fifteen and a half years later, as our country continues to struggle to pay back more than $4 trillion in military expenditures and our communities are reeling with the heart wrenching weight of trying to reintegrate 2.5 million traumatized American soldiers, Lee’s words ring powerfully.

Today Iraq and Afghanistan both stand in teetering rubble after more than a decade of near constant warfare. As the smoke clears on the shattered remnants of their towns and villages, menacing thugs continue to hold sway across both nations, drawing eager recruits from the multitude of families who have been devastated by the hundreds of thousands of dead bodies that the US has left in its wake.

In the 2016 presidential debates, we watched both leading candidates try to out back pedal each other, both working as hard as they could to distance themselves from their prior support of the invasions. These days, everybody across the political spectrum seems to agree that the invasions were wasteful, corrupt and vicious.

But, back then, too many of us were terrified. Silent. Shushed and kept in the dark. Although protests broke out in city squares across the country, for the most part, there was no way to quickly and effectively communicate with each other about what was going on. We were disorganized, ignorant and powerless. And they took advantage of us.

Today, things at least have the potential to be different.

For one, these days a media blackout like the one following September 11 would probably be impossible. Thanks to social media, we can now communicate rapidly with one another and readily scrutinize what’s happening. Content no longer needs to get a green light from a national editorial desk to be seen by millions of Americans.

But, while the Trump administration will never be able to command the kind of political silence that George W Bush did, today we have a new kind of problem on our hands. Sure, it’s become possible for courageous independent truth tellers to go viral, but liars and fear mongers can now do so as well.

We need to be careful. Free speech by itself is no guarantee against tyranny, and the world has never been this noisy.

Real change only happens when people come together across entrenched social differences. If progressives are going to build political power in this country, we’re going to have to build diverse coalitions that span lines of race, class, age and gender, bringing all kinds of people to the table together in a way that genuinely makes each of us feel included.

Thanks to social media, these days, everybody can talk. The question is, can we listen?

]]>http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/2017/03/15/home/thank-god-trump-cant-ever-have-a-911-moment/feed/0706Dill’s a snob. Long live the fringe!http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/2017/02/28/home/dills-a-snob-long-live-the-fringe/
http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/2017/02/28/home/dills-a-snob-long-live-the-fringe/#respondTue, 28 Feb 2017 09:48:08 +0000http://korobkin.bangordailynews.com/?p=762

Gabor Degre | BDN

A couple days ago, Cynthia Dill, a well-to-do Cape Elizabeth resident and former state senator, published a rather horrendous editorial in the Portland Press Herald, arguing that “Democrats need to cull the fringe – starting with Bernie Bros.”

For the most part, her rant is a snotty rag of entitled condescension, but at the core of her piece is essentially a call to action for the new leaders of the Democratic Party to show the party’s more progressive members to the door.

The time, she says, is right. All of these populist pitchforks and torches have wrought nothing but chaos. Thank God the DNC has elected another Washington establishment insider to be their chair. It’s high time for the Democrats to kick out the trouble makers and get back to business as usual.

The root of the problem, she says, is that most odious and infamous of contemporary progressive demographics: the dreaded “Bernie Bros.”

Well, I’m a Bernie Bro. The only thing I’d love more than a surprise visit from my big sister would be the chance to watch federal regulators go to town cracking down on greedy investment bankers.

Yet, as Dill sees it, the only reason people like me would ever oppose Hillary Clinton, Tom Perez and the other big money DC power players at the center of today’s Democratic Party is because, apparently, we’re part of a “boorish gang of sexist, aggressive bullies.” It couldn’t be the Party establishment’s intimate ties to Wall Street, their brutal hawkishness or their tireless support of the unfair corporate trade agreements that have devastated so many American factory towns.

Nope. Those have all been “vicious, unfounded attacks” clearly rooted in an “irrational hatred of Clinton or any Democratic woman running for office or in office.” Never mind that I spent much of last year helping two female friends run for local office, both of whom were Democrats. Clearly, I’m just a loony tune misogynist, harboring the kind of “sick and perverted logic that perpetuates dysfunctional politics.”

As Dill sees it, we must look past a candidate’s excessive wealth and profound disconnect from the population at large. It’s ridiculous to want leaders with integrity who are familiar with the sorts of challenges that low income people face every day. Politics to her are like a magic eye. If only you’d squint hard enough and look past all those skeezy backroom deals and hefty corporate campaign contributions, you’d see angels. Personally, I’m not so sure.

As I see it, Dill’s not just being snobby here, from a tactical standpoint, she’s also being incredibly unwise. Progressive community organizers like me are not just surly waiters who can be fired from carrying trays of champagne around a Cape Elizabeth garden party because the host doesn’t like our attitude.

Increasingly, while we might not control the Party’s purse strings, we’re rapidly becoming the ones with the real power. In the 2016 presidential campaign, despite getting minuscule coverage in the mainstream media, the Internet enabled Bernie Sanders to inspire tens of thousands of people to volunteer with his campaign, including many who practically went to work full time on it. Hillary got almost nobody.

Perhaps ten years ago, it might have seemed reasonable to claim that the only road to political victory was to secure enough large donations to promote the candidate on network television like a new brand of soft drink. But, now that we’re in the age of social media, that won’t cut it anymore. Today, we need candidates who can tap into the American people’s excitement and passion, at least enough for them to share their support for the campaign on social media. And you can’t buy that.

Dill acknowledges the desire for Democratic candidates to appeal to a wider audience, but she cautions against throwing on “a flannel shirt and some Carhartts – as if trading in a hybrid for a pickup truck will win future elections.” Right. Taking some Ivy League trust funder to Reny’s won’t magically get rural Mainers to vote for him. Of course it won’t fix things to simply change what candidates wear. But the answer isn’t for the Party to just return to the same bull pen of losers and let them keep their three piece suits.

Today, the power lies with those who can go viral, and if Trump and Sanders are anything to go on, it’s going to be the traditional underdogs who do that best.

Honest, hardworking, ethical candidates like Bernie never attract the kind of big money donations that candidates like Hillary do, but they inspire people. Voters genuinely love them in a way that nobody loves a politically manipulative shark, and these days, that kind of love is increasingly becoming the key to the castle. I’m not sure people like Dill even recognize how important it’s become for a candidate to be lovable.

Since Trump was elected a little more than a month ago, millions of people have taken to the streets in protest. Every public square in this country is overflowing with evidence that American voters are hungry to get on board with a new, honest, principled progressive movement. But there isn’t really much of one to join. And, as things stand, the void is palpable.

If the Democratic Party wants to help fill that void, they need to own up to the fact that it’s been decades since they seriously prioritized the interests of low income communities over the interests of capital in shaping policy. Voters know it. We all know it. The only people denying it are Democratic Party insiders like Dill.

If the Democratic Party’s going to stand a shot at taking back the federal government and reclaiming all of the state legislatures across the country that they’ve lost control of in recent years, we need leaders who take us seriously. Dill’s wrong. We aren’t thugs. We’re lovers. And we deserve leaders who understand that.

Although it may come as a surprise to many of the people who follow my writing, a number of my friends voted for Trump. And, to be honest, I don’t necessarily fault them for it.

Nobody I knew really denied that Trump was a pig on a personal level, but most of them thought both candidates were pretty repulsive as people, and Trump at least seemed eager to go to bat against the Washington elite on behalf of rural communities.

It was a worthy cause.

America deserves to have a President who cares more about the American people than about the well being of people living in other countries. If you’re coaching the Red Sox, it’s not too much to ask that Dustin Pedroia be more important to you than Masahiro Tanaka. That’s your job.

Look at the philanthropic efforts that the Clintons have done. To date, the Clinton Foundation has raised around $2 Billion, but if you go to the foundation’s website, it’s all about working “to change lives around the world.”

If you’re stuck in a rundown former paper mill town, working awful hours at Wal-Mart to pay your ever increasing bills, it’s easy to see how you might get kind of pissed off at that. You could use a hand, and the Clintons could have been doing stuff to help you, but they weren’t.

It was easy to feel that as rural Maine was falling apart, Clinton was nowhere to be found, too busy putting all her energy into trying to help people on the other side of the planet, while simultaneously sending our troops to go bomb half the Middle East. The fact that she still felt entitled to run our country just added insult to injury.

On the other hand, sure, Trump was kind of a sleazy jackass. But, even if his business practices hadn’t always been above board, at least he’d started businesses and created jobs in this country. Trump had been a fixture of our nation’s pop culture for decades. He loved entertaining the American masses. When he said “America First,” it seemed plausible that he might actually mean it.

The election, however, was months ago.

Trump’s the only guy in the spotlight right now. It’s no longer about him vs. Clinton. It’s about what he’s doing for our state, and personally, the impacts that I see him having on Maine are terrible.

While Trump is indeed moving forward with enacting isolationist trade policy at the national level, I find it hard to believe that ending NAFTA is going to be the magic bullet he claims it is. I think it’s pretty clear we’ve been scammed.

If Trump’s efforts to repeal the ACA pass, and it seems clear that they will, each of America’s 400 Highest-Income Households will get a tax cut of about $7 Million a year, tallying up to $2.8 Billion, roughly the value of premium tax credits that people in the 20 smallest states and DC will lose. In addition, around 20 million Americans, 66 percent of whom have a high school education or less, will be left completely uninsured.

The American people know that we’re being taken advantage of by the elite – that’s why we elected a populist firebrand like Trump. But we’ve been had. Trump’s in bed with all the other rich guys, hoarding the profits that we all work so hard to generate, leaving us with crumbs, too broke even to go to the doctor.

And his efforts to fire two thirds of the people working at the EPA and gag the National Park Service are deplorable. Global warming is dangerously real, just ask any Maine lobsterman. The only people who gain from policies like these are Trump’s billionaire buddies in the oil industry who will now be free to do irreparable damage to the American landscape. This isn’t standing up for the American people and our homeland. It’s the opposite. It’s selling us out, so the billionaires can come in and do whatever they want to the Maine woods.

Whatever you might feel about folks from Africa moving to Maine, all the economists who’ve studied their impact on our state, such as these folks at CEI, say they’ve been a strong boon. Just stroll down Lisbon Street in Lewiston and take in all the immigrant businesses that have brought that city’s once dilapidated downtown back to life.

Maine’s small towns are losing their smart, young people in droves. We genuinely need families from countries like Sudan and Somalia to help jump start our state’s more rural economies. As Maine ages, our older residents will need people to provide the services they need to survive. Unless their kids pull a 180 and head home tomorrow, which doesn’t seem likely to happen, Maine’s seniors will be screwed if we don’t get more immigrants into our towns to care for them.

Trump, as we all know, has announced that refugees from both Sudan and Somalia, along with five other nations, will no longer be welcome here in the United States. It’s a shame. I’m not sure how rural Maine is supposed to become great again when there’s nobody around for miles willing to change your pepe’s Depends and spoon feed him his Grape Nuts.

You can deny what I’m saying. Go ahead. Call me stupid. Tell me I’m just an entitled little Masshole. Say I should stop teaching high school kids to build software because, clearly, I’m corrupting Maine’s youth. Tell me how you know better than me because you’re a veteran or you’re older than me or whatever silly reason you’ve got to explain your inability to form a rational argument in response to what I’m saying here.

Maybe just throw Trump’s infamous one word epithet at me: “Wrong!”

But I’m not.

Coming into November, we all had to choose between two fairly terrible candidates. If you voted for Trump, as much as I disagreed at the time, I doubt there was anything I could have said that would have changed your mind.

But, as we head into February, remaining a diehard Trump supporter seems like a different thing altogether. I just wish we could all agree that many of the new policies that he’s been announcing are tyrannical madness. The future of the United States depends on it.

Today, over two months after the 2016 presidential election came to its horrifying conclusion, American liberals are still reeling from the shock of watching Donald J. Trump, a person most educated people find viscerally repulsive and unprecedentedly terrifying, assume the highest seat possible within our system of government.

We’ve now lost both chambers of Congress. In 32 states, Republicans also now control both chambers, covering 61 percent of the U.S. population.

As Trump prepares to take office next Friday, he’s been selecting the members of his cabinet, and without exception, they’ve been wealthy corporatists at war with publicly funded social services and indifferent to environmental destruction. For all practical purposes, it seems bullies across our country now have carte blanche to commit hate crimes.

We lost big this year, and unfortunately, my guess is that we’re going to continue to lose until we develop an approach that’s actually capable of winning.

To do so, we’ve got to understand how the conservative ethos, which is overwhelmingly popular across this country, operates. From Karl Rove to Frank Luntz to Trump himself, the Republicans have been great at that in recent years. Frankly, Democrats have been awful at it.

But, the good news, I believe, is that this may not be as hard as it at first appears.

For one thing, liberals weren’t the only ones who saw this election as a choice between the lesser of two evils. Many conservatives did too. They just hated her a lot more than they hated him.

At a time when many Americans were becoming increasingly isolationist, Clinton came across as virulently hawkish. She believed in globalizing trade. She wanted more open borders. She had close ties to the Saudis and wanted to end domestic coal mining. She was an avowed secularist whose followers scoffed at the kind of hard line Christianity that many Americans feel is at the core of our nation’s moral backbone.

She came across as calculating and ruthless, a veteran orchestrator of backroom deals whose insecure Blackberry was likely full of the phone numbers of nefarious warlords and crooked CEOs around the world. She’d made millions of dollars, not through being an entrepreneur, but from milking personal connections and delivering secret speeches to Wall Street financiers.

It’s easy to see why so many pissed off downtrodden white folks in rural America would have been repulsed by her.

In contrast, Trump seemed like a bad boy, a rogue, willing to speak his mind, beholden to nobody. While Clinton worked tirelessly to please the highfalutin politically correct coastal media, Trump had no problem going against them. He wasn’t afraid to be hated. He spoke directly to the forgotten heartland, validating their suffering like nobody else in recent memory. They came out in droves for him.

Some conservatives did hold out, proclaiming #NeverTrump, but the vast majority of them still voted for him, even if they had to hold their nose to do it. Now that he’s won, most everyone to the right of center has begun doing everything they can to curry favor with his budding white nationalist administration.

If progressives are to retake this country, we’ve got to turn this tide.

We’ve got to win over the hearts and minds of at least some of the millions of people who voted for him. If we can’t do that, we’ll keep losing elections to bullies just like him.

But how do we do that? How do we make everybody, not just us, hate him? Since winning he’s become substantially more, not less, popular with the American public. Clearly what we’re doing isn’t working.

To begin with, let’s remember that any working class person who openly proclaims their unwavering allegiance to Trump is largely advocating against their material interests.

Low income Americans desperately need better access to good healthcare. One of Trump’s first measures in office is likely to be gutting the ACA and cutting federal allocations for Medicare and Medicaid.

If everyday Americans are going to stand a chance at competing in today’s rapidly globalizing job market, they desperately need good public education. Trump’s appointed a billionaire to run the Department of Education whom the ACLU has condemned for doing the exact opposite and “elevating for-profit schools with no consideration of the severe harm done to traditional public schools.”

So, why are so many of his supporters so loyal to him?

To answer that, let’s look at the widespread support that Americans have for the Fundamentalist notion that God created the earth in its entirety a mere few thousand years ago, something that as recently as 2014, 42% of Americans believed in strongly. 76% of evangelicals are diehard Republicans. If we could understand their allegiance to this kind of Creationism, we’d be a lot closer to understanding their allegiance to Trump.

Creationism like this is often seen as a matter of belief. But it isn’t, at least not in the modern sense. Today, most of our beliefs about the world come from research and observation. They’re fluid. You state a hypothesis and search for evidence for it. If you don’t find it, you lose the belief. If creationism were a belief in that sense, it’d be a relic of the past.

Perhaps this notion is a matter of faith? It isn’t that either. Grappling with faith looks like a recovering heroin addict grasping breathlessly to feel that a power greater than themselves can restore them to sanity and lead them away from temptation. True faith is the antidote to existential despair. Believing that the earth is thousands of years old instead of billions won’t fill that kind of hole in your soul.

So what is it?

It’s about belonging to a group. It’s a password. A secret handshake. When you enter a new community in middle America, they ask you how old the world is. If you say “6,000 years,” you’re in the club. If you don’t, you’re ostracized. It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to. It’s not about faith or belief. It’s something different – it’s a sign that you’re on the home team, like wearing a Patriots jersey or flying an American flag.

That’s what being a Trump supporter has become.

It doesn’t matter that Trump’s extreme wrath, lust and greed are the literal definition of mortal sin. The loyalty to Trump that conservative Christians continue to retain long after the election doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to. It’s not about ethics. It’s about belonging. It’s about making it clear that you live in the light of Christ, not the savage pagan darkness.

Until the Left is able to offer that kind of daily sense of belonging and salvation, we will continue to lose. And so will the world.

A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of spending a few days out at the activist encampment in Standing Rock, North Dakota, the primary site of resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the 1,172-mile-long “black snake” that, if completed, will bring crude oil from the Brakken oil fields all the way to Illinois.

Led by the Lakota people of the Standing Rock Reservation whose sacred sites are being ravaged by the construction, the encampment has attracted tens of thousands of activists over the last several months. With people arriving from every tribe across the continent, in addition to a diverse multitude of allies, the encampment has quickly become one of the largest gatherings of Native Americans in history.

Over the next week, I plan to write a series of pieces based on my trip, covering a variety of topics, but first, I’d like to answer the question that I’ve received most since getting back to Portland:

Is it over?

I first heard the news as I was sitting in the Minneapolis Airport, awaiting the last leg of my trip out there, when a friend texted me that the Army Corps of Engineers had just announced that construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline would need to halt until the federal government could complete an Environmental Impact Statement.

An EIS can take anywhere from two months to 18 years, so it’s not impossible that this announcement, which was made Dec. 4, will mean a serious victory for the activists and an end, for now at least, of the construction efforts.

But we won’t know for sure until the 38 banks currently funding the project meet in early January to determine whether or not they want to continue funding the project.

It’s possible that instead of doubling down and renewing their efforts, the investors will simply choose to cut their losses and walk away. The project has already cost $3.8 billion, and the price of crude oil is down to less than half of what it was around this time three years ago (dropping from $110.53 in Sept. of 2013 to $51.91 today). At this rate, it will take the investors years to recoup the costs of construction.

Throw in the EIS and the growing global condemnation as groups like Amnesty International have begun speaking out about the authorities’ violent suppression of the activists, and it’s no surprise that some investors, like DNB, a Norwegian bank which provided 10% of the initial capital, appear likely to pull out.

But, even if some investors leave, it seems likely that others will remain.

The pipeline is largely completed, with the exception of the section crossing the Missouri River (where the encampment is). Despite the recent slump, for a number of reasons the price of oil is currently rebounding, and it’s now the highest it’s been in almost a year and a half. With a pro-oil, climate change denier like Trump about to become President, it’s hard to predict exactly what will happen.

For now, DAPL is keeping their lights on. Literally. Every night, massive floodlights from the construction site shine into the camp, like the all seeing eye of Big Brother.

Rumor in the camps is that DAPL has built semi-permanent barracks to house their private security forces. Who knows if it’s true – much of what I heard in the camps may have just been speculation passed around campfire to campfire – but it’s clear that the construction crews and their armed enforcers are not about to go anywhere.

In fact, the day that the Army Corps denied the easement, DAPL put out their own statement, ensuring that they are “fully committed to ensuring that this vital project is brought to completion and fully expect to complete construction of the pipeline without any additional rerouting in and around Lake Oahe. Nothing this Administration has done today changes that in any way.”

In the camps, there’s even a rumor that DAPL is actually going to continue to build anyway, despite the order to stop, and with the intention of simply paying the subsequent fines down the road, but upon further research, I think it’s pretty clear that won’t happen.

But God knows they want to. In any case, nothing’s over.

At best, the fight has just been prolonged.

For now, as weather conditions are worsening, the local elders are asking that “anyone that is considering traveling to join the encampments at Standing Rock stay home and instead take bold action in your local communities to force investors to divest from the project.”

Although many people are still hunkered down for the winter out there, as I see it, the request to bring the fight home is actually a much more ambitious call to action.

It’s one thing to travel across the country to witness something extraordinary. Something else altogether to make something extraordinary happen in our own community here in Maine.

But I believe we can. Tides are turning, and we’re flowing into a new moment.

If there’s one thing I brought home from my trip to Standing Rock, it’s hope.

In 2000, when Bill Clinton turned the Oval Office over to George W. Bush, he was effectively just passing it back to the same political cohort, and family, that he’d taken it from eight years prior. W’s cabinet even included Nixon’s Chief of Staff from 1970, Donald Rumsfield.

As corrupt and violent as Bush was, the Republican machine that he was a part of knew how to run the government and had deep roots in Washington, enabling them to zoom in and quickly set up shop.

Trump has none of that.

He ran his campaign on the premise that he wasn’t a beltway insider, but now he’s in charge of one of the largest organizations in human history, and he doesn’t seem to know the first thing about how to run it. To date, several key agencies including the Justice and Defense Departments have yet to even hear from him.

Trump doesn’t play squash with high ranking diplomats. I guarantee you he couldn’t name all the countries on a blank map of the world. I doubt he’s ever even followed a bill all the way through Congress.

He’s never claimed to be a politician, and that appears to be one of the few places where he was telling the truth. He’s a TV salesman – the Billy Mays of White Nationalism, selling the kind of comforting and inspiring narrative that folks living in our country’s bleeding red middle were starving for.

Yes, my fellow Americans, he said, your lives suck. But it’s not your fault. It’s the Mexicans, the Muslims and the corrupt politicians in DC. You don’t even have to eat your vegetables or stop shopping at Wal-Mart. Just vote for me, and I’ll make America great again!

During his campaign, Trump was, at best, a shiny two dimensional cardboard cut out of a politician, but disgusted by the current face of modern government, the American people still happily chose him over a DC veteran with decades of experience sitting in the epicenter of our empire.

At least Trump was different, an outsider, they thought, independent and unafraid, that alone made him inherently trustworthy. Even if he was a scumbag whose every word was outlandish hyperbole, he was still far better than any insider.

But it’s impossible to be a rogue outsider and the Commander in Chief simultaneously.

While it remains to be seen exactly who will end up in Trump’s cabinet, so far, it doesn’t look good. The people Trump is inviting all seem to be ideologues and thugs. Tough guys eager to use the authority of the federal government to protect their private interests and suppress their opposition. Newt Gingrich even wants to bring back the “House Un-American Activities Committee” to go after dissidents.

This is a moment of great uncertainty, to say the least, made all the more so because the rest of American politics is also in such disarray.

Within the next few months, we’ll inevitably witness the emergence of a new inside. Trump will probably find at least a few people to serve with him who truly are competent, however atrocious their values may be, and hard as it may be to imagine, Trump will grow into the role of being our President.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s going to be a long time before we hear him crack another joke about Rosie O’Donnell.